The San Francisco based personal finance bot intends to use the amount to develop the product and deepen its pool of machine learning talent.

Social Capital was the sole investor in the round.

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Penny currently only lives in its own iOS- and Android-based mobile app. However, Mitchell Lee, co-founder of Penny, noted that they would definitely consider putting their bot on a platform like Facebook Messenger, but not yet — mainly because the startup can’t yet see a clear value proposition of offering Penny on other platforms. This is because the young platforms aren’t yet developed enough to fully support Penny’s key features (secure password entry, pre-populated responses, etc).
The startup will use the funding to hire one or two people to deepen their expertise in machine learning, a critical (but often forgotten) part of developing a bot. It will also let them continue to experiment with figuring out how Penny will provide value to users, as the app currently doesn’t have any monetization components